It is possible to use THERMOCOUPLE-4 as a standalone thermocouple amplifier or as a peripheral to a microcontroller system. It can be used in almost any application or system to amplify and condition the raw voltage output from thermocouples. Featuring four socketed LT1025 ICs, THERMOCOUPLE-4 provides amplification, filtering and cold-junction compensation for E, J, K, R, S and T type thermocouples. Conditioned output voltages for 4 thermocouple channels are available on a 26-pin dual-row pin header.

It is recommended to use this board in combination with the DAQ-2543 or DAQ-128 analog-to-digital converter board.

Stack Together for Up to 64 Thermocouple Inputs

Each THERMOCOUPLE-4A peripheral board provides four inputs. This means you can connect four thermocouples to the same THERMOCOUPLE-4A board.

Two THERMOCOUPLE-4A boards can be stacked for a total of eight thermocouple inputs. The thermocouple stack can be installed on top of the DAQ-2543 board. The DAQ-2543 board can be installed on top of your microcontroller system.

If you need 16 thermocouple inputs (four THERMOCOUPLE-4A boards) there is a different approach: The DAQ-128 peripheral board operates on I2C bus. Each board has a 3-bit address selector. Thus you can replace a DAQ-2543 with a DAQ-128 in the previous 8-input setup. To provide eight more inputs, you can use another DAQ-128 board. Two extra THERMOCOUPLE-4A boards will be installed on top of the second DAQ-128 board. The second setup can be connected to the first setup using a ribbon cable.

Theoretically, you can build a setup with 64 thermocouple inputs in that manner — one DAQ-128 for every two THERMOCOUPLE-4A.

Users of MicroTRAK and MINI-MAX systems take note: To use this board as a peripheral, you must connect it to a DAQ-2543 or DAQ-128 which then connects to your system, as this board does not have the 2×10-pin expansion header used on MINI-MAX CPU modules. The one exception is the MINI-MAX/51-F, which has the 26-pin header used by this board so you can connect it directly.